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My talented friend Karen Sparks is allowing me to offer up to 12 signed and numbered copies of a four-color art print she made of Tori Amos back in 1998 to help me raise money so I can continue to write “Be the Music.” This is how Karen describes these prints:

On July 28, 1998, Tori Amos performed during the Plugged ’98 tour at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. I took photos from first row, center, and created a silkscreen print with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. I edited the print to include a censorship bar over her crotch. I made approximately 25 of these. Tori Amos has one.

These are printed on expensive heavyweight paper, the size is 22″ x 30″ and the print area dimensions are 15 ¾” x 26″.

Karen tells me the prints she is allowing me to offer are numbered 4 through 15. These have the typical minor variations from one to the other which exist due to the handmade printing process. Each of these will ship within days of your making a $50 donation to help me write “Be the Music” via my Authr fundraising site.

I have loved Storyteller Dolls since I first saw one. I bought one to display where I write to remind me that what I need to stay focused on is telling the story. Storyteller Dolls were invented in New Mexico in 1964 by Helen Cordero of the Cochiti Pueblos. The idea of an elder passing the ancestor stories down to the next generation instantly made sense when I saw a doll, and it is important to me. My long-time friend Karen Sparks is a wonderfully creative artist who is talented in many media. I first saw Karen’s work in person in 1999 after meeting her online the year before, so I knew how amazing her work is. Long ago she said she wanted to do the cover and maybe other needed art for this book, and I was happy that she said she still wanted to do it when I asked her. One day as I was brainstorming to come up with a cover design for “Be the Music,” I glanced over to the shelf by my turntable, and flashed on what I wanted the main design element to be.

I asked Karen if she was up for making a ceramic Storyteller Doll. Lucky for me she agreed. I suggested maybe the hair might be an orange, corn needed to be in the design, and maybe some pianos would be involved; Tori Amos and many little girls who play piano tell them their stories, so it makes sense that pianos are among the doll’s listeners. With Tori’s 1994 b-side “Frog On My Toe” in mind, in which her late, beloved grandfather she called Poppa has a conversation with her and shares some of his Cherokee wisdom, I’m sure Karen found putting a frog on the doll’s toe irresistible. We went back and forth in email and sharing photos for weeks, but all the wonderful elements and detail of execution are Karen’s.

Once we had Talula, we needed to figure out an overall book cover design. Again Karen wanted to do the art, and I had the kernel of an idea: let’s put Talula in front of a backdrop of mountains near Taos where Under the Pink was recorded in 1993. I found a photographer who makes such photos and sells them online, and she is a librarian, to boot. Lisa made some new images of mountains near Taos for us and we chose one. Then I extracted Talula from the background of the professional photographs Karen had gotten made of her, presented Karen with a mock-up design, then let Karen be Karen to choose fonts and do a final design. It turned out Karen is as talented with Photoshop as she is with other tools. I hope others are as pleased with what Karen created as she and I are.

I was introduced to the world of professional grade sound recording right before Christmas in 1971. A college friend of my father’s, Paul, took me with him to record a local community group’s performance of The Messiah at Montgomery Blair High School, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Paul brought me along with Jack Towers, several pricey Neumann microphones, and some portable Ampeg reel-to-reel recording decks. Portable in this instance meant each man had a foot-locker sized deck, along with a similar size pre-amp that had handles on the sides. Each piece required two people to carry it.

Neumann U87

Paul could be described safely as an audio nut. In his Takoma Park basement, his hand-built home stereo included horns that had been used for early demonstrations of stereo in DAR Constitution Hall in the 1950s.

The horns provided part of his mid-range.

Paul was the official recordist of the world-renown D.C. Youth Orchestra. Soon I would accompany him regularly to the home of the DCYOP, Coolidge High School in D.C., quite often to the Kennedy Center which had opened recently, and to other events to record regional orchestral, chamber groups, choirs, and jazz. Again with Jack Towers, we recorded jazz violinist Joe Venuti at Georgetown’s Blues Alley on his final D.C. visit before a return to Italy, where he died two years later.

I already had a taste for many different types of music. I enjoyed Top 40 radio that was heavy on Motown, and was collecting Aretha Franklin albums. I would listen repeatedly to any song that provided multiple full-body orgasms, wondering how that happened. I convinced my mother to take me to Constitution Hall to see Leonard Bernstein and the N.Y. Philharmonic in August 1967 on Bernstein’s last trip through the area as the NY Phil’s conductor, and Paul took me to Constitution Hall to attend a performance by the great Russian pianist Emil Gilels. Paul was an enthusiastic opera fan and season-ticket-holder for Constitution Hall concerts, and after each piece he would place his open hand next to his mouth and shout “Bravo!” at the stage many times. I was not used to such unashamed enthusiasm.

WPAS ad in 22 Nov 1970 Washington Post, incl. Emil Gilels

The only pop concert I attended early on was Peter, Paul & Mary at the Carter Barron for my 13th or 14th birthday, but I only wanted to go because John Denver was opening for them. (It had been sparsely attended while afflicted with light showers.) During my mid-teens, I regularly listened to a jazz anthology series on Public Radio which had 180 half-hour episodes; they were played late nights and early mornings, and my nocturnal orientation often allowed me to hear two episodes a day. I heard most of them at least three times before it wasn’t on the schedule any longer. It was like attending my own secret jazz school. The episodes were written with emphasis on each artist’s personal story as related to their music career, and, while often tragic, many of these stories left me with a deep longing for stories of current-day musicians that felt as important and influential.

Music that was this accessible as it took one through glorious 20-minute dancing tapestries of buoyant harmonic changes, with instrumental solos and multi-layered vocals, to deliver one in a tidy package to a different place quickly seemed the obvious norm. This was what rock music could provide and did provide. Imagine my surprise when I attended a rock concert where a band played its songs more or less like their studio recordings, then were done. I felt ripped off!

For years I played drums with many guitarists and bass players in various band attempts. We rarely got out of the basement, but I took an interest in learning the sound reinforcement gear. Thanks to my grandmother, I attended Omega Recording Studios in Kensington, for basic and advanced recording engineering courses. With my longtime enthusiasm as musical omnivore and in the preservation of sound recordings, when I applied in 1990 to work as a playback technician in the stacks of the largest recorded sound collection in the world at the Library of Congress [LC], I was a natural fit. I’m confident that when my supervisor-to-be asked each candidate what we knew about the preservation of sound recordings, few others provided a 25-minute answer, and none continued for 35 meticulous minutes visiting several continents, when asked what kinds of music they were familiar with.

I had my first serious encounter with the music of Tori Amos at LC. I was becoming good friends with a 120-day temp worker. One day over lunch I asked what she seemed to be listening to all the time on her yellow sports model Walkman as she stood at the great wall of surplus sorting LPs. Upon returning from lunch, I walked several feet over to the Atlantic CD shelves and put up a copy of Little Earthquakes on the UREI main monitors, listening as I sorted baskets of incoming LPs while seated just inside the entrance to the stacks. I didn’t get a clear audition of all of it, so I put it up again the next day. That was it. I bought my own copy. Around this time, awareness of and access to the pre-web, text-based Internet were spreading around LC. I subbed to a command line UNIX shell account for personal Internet access, and managed to join the Really Deep Thoughts discussion mailing list.

Under the Pink finally came out. By this time I was relishing the ability the Internet afforded to communicate with others swept up in this music, then, weeks later, a concert at Lisner. By the time I reached the counter at the Hecht Company’s ticket department in Wheaton Plaza, they only had single tickets left. I had come for six together and bought the last six. Having read so many concert reports from others and knowing how much the music affected me, I was fearful of being too close to the stage, so I kept the ticket farthest from the front for myself, five rows from the back wall. I managed only one more concert that year when she came back in July, but before the 1996 tour began, I knew I wanted to attend as many concerts as I could. I traveled around the East Coast, then helped a friend move to Seattle that July by car, with the agreement to borrow her car when we were on the West Coast to attend more concerts. Then I flew home from SeaTac after attending my concerts numbered 9 – 18 of the tour.

I saved up enough vacation time to be able to travel to the U.K. in May 1998 for the start of the main tour, Tori’s first with a full band. The last song on Boys for Pele, “Twinkle,” had given rise to a curiosity about the Island of Iona and its Abbey, which were mentioned in the lyrics. I took the opportunity of going to the U.K. on a cheaper flight a few days earlier than I needed to for the concerts, and spent four days at Mrs. Black’s B&B at Clachan Corrach on the Isle of Iona. The six concerts I attended in the U.K. helped me set a baseline for the early band shows. This allowed me to apprehend the progress made later in the summer when they developed a serious group-think proficiency. Finer points of this band became real to me by the end of the tour, when I attended 19 of the last 20 concerts. Such satisfying music—each musician and crew member was top-notch, knew why they were there, and all of them did their jobs with personal flair, even the riggers. I felt privileged to be able to experience the full scope of that tour, and to meet many others with so much dedication to the music. A year plus tens of thousands of miles later, all of it in my faded red 1987 Chevy Nova, I wrote something and posted it to the Precious Things mailing list that inspired a friend to ask if I ever considered writing a book on the music.

I think he expected I would mainly write a book for fans to buy, but he never said, and in the contract we would sign nearly a year later, I have full control over editorial content. I wanted to write something more meaningful and with broader appeal than that. I kept thinking of something one of my favorite bosses at LC used to tell me was the main thing to convey when writing a book on an artist: “What does it mean?” He always told me to not simply catalog and describe the work. I wanted to know why I’d extended myself so much to attend as many concerts as I had, stretching limits of body, car, wallet, and the comprehension of my non-Tori friends and family. What in the music does this? Is it something in “the music itself” that does it? Is it a combination of the ecological ingredients involved in attending concerts including the travel, venues, conversations, Internet? Is it the knowing looks shared from the stage? While all those things figure into the answer to the question “Why?” the music is clearly the dominant factor. What in the music causes such strong personal emotional responses? How does that work, and what can anyone interested in creating, performing, or experiencing great art of any kind do to foster deep, even primal resonances in themselves?

Tori Amos music is singular, but the aural and psychological landscapes of how her music works aren’t. I intuitively knew that brain science and the nervous system would explain some of this stuff, but not all. I knew the lessons of Carl Jung were important to Tori, and that they must have helped steer her approach to songwriting and performance, so I needed to learn some Jungian theory. I read some canonical books on music and medicine and the brain, then read some which were recently published. I sought guidance on learning Jungian thought from the librarian at the Jung Society of Washington. I still attend lectures and classes they put on, at least I have as recently as 18 months ago. Two years ago I attended an eight-week course at the Jung Society entitled Dreams and Active Imagination. The analyst who taught the course granted me an exemption from bringing a dream into class on which to perform Active Imagination, allowing me to share a song instead. I presented the most mystical Tori Amos song: “Sister Janet.”

Over the years I always let my nose and ears tell me what area or discipline to study next. I felt as if I were in a graduate degree program without any advisors. I had to figure out everything by myself from scratch. I went down a few worthless hallways, but only a couple minor ones. A person here and there could advise me in general ways in their area of expertise, but really, I was almost always entirely on my own. I read more than 200 books for this project. I did genealogy research off and on for many years, including trips to eastern Tennessee where Tori’s beloved grandfather came from, and where her storied ancestor Margaret Little lived and died. I took a music course at Montgomery College, and attended lectures sponsored by the Smithsonian on many topics. I studied music theory, mythology, Joseph Campbell, fairy tales, mermaids, neurology, brain science, memory, charisma, literature, writing, acting methods, the means by which a variety of keyboard instruments operate, slavery in the ivory trade in Africa and New England and how the piano industries were reliant upon it—a literal bloodline of the piano, a great deal on the Cherokee and other First Nations peoples, including trips to the Carolinas, and to the American Philosophical Society Library in Philly where they have major collections on tribal peoples, including many historical sound recordings of the spoken Cherokee language.

My mother developed serious trouble walking and standing in April 2001. Soon she was sleeping in a hospital bed in her living room, and along with home health workers who stopped by several times per week, I was taking care of her. I got her some outpatient appointments at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, but they weren’t sure what was wrong with her. After six months under this arrangement, the home health nurse said if a woman wasn’t going to take care of my mother day to day, she would have her sent to a nursing home. My mother’s remaining sibling, her older sister, agreed to take charge of my mother. A new tour was about to begin in Florida. 9/11 happened. As agreed, in late September 2001, I took my mother to southwestern Virginia and stayed with her a couple days at my aunt’s, then I picked up a friend near Charlotte and continued to the first tour stop in Florida.

Tori Amos at the Oakdale Theater, 14 October 2001

We managed nearly three weeks on the tour and picked up an old tour companion in New York City, but I eventually needed to return home due to circumstances of others. My father had died in a Texas hospital that summer, and although we hadn’t spoken in a few years, I received a posthumous gift from him some weeks later. Having begun the tour and savored its glory, I was spurred to head west to finish the U.S. leg of the tour. An old friend in Philly agreed to come with me. I picked him up and we headed to Oakland. My mother’s health continued to decline slowly at her sister’s, and she was completely bedridden for many years. I came to spend increasing amounts of time there. Coincidences of geography allowed me to continue research from time to time, but I was nearly done with anything I set out to research, and was waiting to be able to get my living environment set up with my research materials where I could easily access them, in my own increasingly mobility-challenged condition.

Days after my mother died nearly three years ago, I went to a long-standing appointment in Baltimore with Johns Hopkins’ Neurology Department. Several Hopkins visits led to my diagnosis of multi-level disk degeneration. I don’t have much control over the muscles in my lower legs. I can only walk short distances even using two canes or a rollator. I began looking for trustable people to help me clean out my mother’s house, move me to a larger house with fewer stairs, and help get my research materials and personal effects organized so I could set about writing my book in earnest. Most of my helper friends could not come to my new house as often as I wanted and the organizing process was lengthy, and now I find myself out of cash.

In addition to having so much experience of the music, I did a ton of research on this book project across many disciplines, and have things to report that are my own. I am a strong Mercury/Hermes Archetype personality, which I came to realize only after Tori told me I was Mercury in Manchester in May of 1998. Perceiving how things are connected when others don’t and changing people’s thinking are major aspects of my personality. I want to affect the way music is taught with this book, and am planning to market it heavily to music teachers in addition to Tori Amos people. Examples I have gleaned from studying the life and music of Tori Amos have taught me techniques and methods anyone can learn to increase their ability to compose, perform, and listen to music at a soul level. These things embrace the fact that we can simultaneously experience ourselves, and feel more invested in the human community.

I estimate I will need a good six months more to finish the writing-editing process and go to print. My friend and initial investor who suggested a book will cover the various costs of printing when that time comes. I need to raise money for all my living expenses until I finish writing the book. If I am unable to continue living in this house which is set up for me to write even though I have mobility problems, it may be that years of research I’ve done will go to waste. I want to share what I’ve learned, and I’m confident many people want to read it. All I know to do is to throw this project and myself to the tender mercies of the music and Tori Amos communities. I’ve continuously demonstrated my refusal to give up on this project, but my current investors can only support me to a point, as they have their own families and other responsibilities to tend. In 20 active years online, I’ve taken great pains to avoid sharing much of my personal life publicly. This is nothing I would choose to do were it not my only hope for getting this book finished. I’m asking for your support and assistance in promoting this crowdfunding campaign.

I’ve gone live with my book project’s crowdfunding campaign on Authr.com. My book will be entitled “BE THE MUSIC : How Tori Amos Does It.” In addition to being able to pre-order eBooks, posters which have a photo of the wonderful Storyteller Doll sculpture Karen Sparks made for the book cover, and published thank yous by name are available as premiums on my Authr page. I need money to continue living where I am for an estimated six more months to finish writing my book, at which point, my investor from long ago will pay the costs of publication.

I’ve done huge amounts of research in many areas since 2000. I believe I have formed an understanding of how art works, and have devised methods to use to teach composers, performers, and listeners to have more fulfilling experiences with music, through using a careful study of Tori Amos, her family history, and her music.

I’ve become extremely mobility impaired over the last five years, and now I can only walk short distances with great difficulty using two canes. This rented house is set up so I can access most of my research materials despite my mobility problems. Should I need to move elsewhere soon, my materials would surely be more difficult to access. With as much work as I’ve done for this book, if I can’t get to my research books and other materials with ease, all my years of work could end up for naught. I’ve overcome a variety of obstacles over the years, including the slow, traumatic decline of my mother’s health, leading up to her death three years ago. Then I needed to hire a lot of people to clean out her cluttered house, and to help me set up this rented house with the research materials I had accumulated. All of this has been hugely complicated by my increasing lack of mobility, and was also expensive.

Please encourage your friends to check out my publisher’s crowdfunding site at: <http://authr.com/title/2677/be-the-music_.html>. I wrote a much longer biographical story which is on my blog. I hope those with time to read it and to check out the links will find it entertaining as well as informative. 🙂 The biographical piece is greatly tailored toward Tori Amos folk. Please find the address at the end of some of my pages on Authr. After an expected initial rush of interest by Tori Amos people, the intention is to continue marketing “BE THE MUSIC” mainly to music teachers so as to alter the way music is taught. A simple goal, is it not?

I hope many people will see the importance of this work, and will agree to support it at Authr.

Great thanks to anyone who helps publicize this. It’s going to be a great challenge. Each of you is my only hope.

Hello:

I was moved to express a few thoughts on last night’s Providence show. This isn’t exactly a review, but anyhow…

Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Providence, Rhode Island, 11/30/99

“The whole air seemed alive as if the tongues of those great cold, hard metal things had become flesh and joy. They burst into being screaming with delight and the city vibrated. Some wordless thing they said touched something so deep inside you that they made tears come.”

—Emily Carr (Canadian painter, 1871 – 1945)

I’ve learned that there’s no way to know in advance from one show format to the next how Tori’s going to drive when she comes out of the garage. On the ’96 Dew Drop Inn tour she had a sports car, and proceeded to lead us at great speed through mountainous hairpin turns–pushing her limits and ours, seemingly daring herself to see how hard and how fast she could lead us without drifting over the edge of a cliff.

Those shows were often quite scary, and they came to seem sometimes like some sort of ritual testing ground of naked human emotion: How much feeling could she get in touch with, dig out and project toward to us? How much could she take, and how much could *we* take? She seemed to be keeping few secrets hidden, and on any given night anything and everything was fair game. I loved those shows with an abiding passion. Some of the deepest emotions I ever experienced in my whole life came around on that tour, and I never forget to this day how important all of that was and is to me.

The band shows last year and this seemed as if countryside jaunts in the family SUV. She used a more powerful one for the arena shows than she did for the smaller venues, but all were larger-than-life experiences, developed in no small part to impress with their pure might. Surely, she went off-road and utilized four-wheel drive over rugged terrain at points during these shows. Unlike some people, I loved the band shows a great deal, and to see how well she was ultimately able to pull off her vision of them gave me feelings of pride in her abilities as a talented and varied performer. And I liked having a few solo piano songs within the paradigm of a band concert. The shift at those shows between the types of instrumentation was pulled off in a way that seemed both casual and appropriate, and we got to experience the best of each world. For all their sheer force of energy, the band shows were approachable, engaging, welcoming, and often even joyous. I loved the hell out of the band shows.

It was with a huge amount of trepidation that I attended the solo piano show last night in Providence. I didn’t think my nervous system these days could take a harrowing concert of the type the DDI tour came to exemplify. Frankly, I didn’t enjoy watching her having to bear the bulk of the musical burden on her shoulders then, and even just for her to have endured the wear and tear on her body as she did in ’96 took a visible toll on her as well. I mean to refer to more than just a physical toll, but an emotional and spiritual one as well. I don’t know what all she was going through out there on the road in ’96, but we saw enough of its effects on her as a person that I came to be quite concerned for her by tour’s end. And although I attended nearly three dozen DDI shows, merely by reading accounts of those shows and talking with people who were there, one could readily tell that bubbling beneath the surface, there was a lot going on with her that year. I was relieved when it finally came to an emotional and life-changing conclusion.

I was therefore extremely relieved when I attended last night’s solo piano outing in Providence. Yes, she had her lithe sports car, but instead of taking us out at a breakneck pace, she seemed a calmer, less furtive and more seasoned pilot than I had ever seen at a solo show. I am perfectly content not to have to follow her at top speed along dangerous curves. Being led with introspection down dark and winding country roads suits me fine. It’s more than enough for me to be able to accompany her on these journeys, no matter what their nature. It’s great to simply be with her, and there surely was plenty of her in this Providence concert.

Tori has shown that she can pull off a variety of show formats. She has nothing to prove anymore. Now seems to me to be an upcoming time off the road to regroup musically, and simply to live. I think that holds true for many of us, including those of us who go to the shows.

I believe she needn’t worry who’s going to be around the next time she emerges from her garage to take a spin. I’m confident that many of us will be there with our thumbs out hoping to catch a ride, waiting to see where she has decided to take us next. I continue to have an immense amount of faith in her musical sensibilities, and where they steer her on her personal musical journey. And I love her very much.

Hello, Folks:

I’m starting to feel like an idiot when I talk about the concerts on this tour. I mean, I’ve seen lots of amazing shows since 1994, and as for public comments, I have always tended to discuss the better shows and to remain quiet about a concert unless it was either pretty damn good, or there was something special to mention. So, maybe I never left adequate room to describe shows that might achieve heights no show has before.

Such is my current dilemma. This Wallingford concert was so far off the scale of any show I have ever seen that there is no possible way to not sound like a flaming lunatic when discussing it. I know it wasn’t just my own distorted view of things, though. To a person—including friends who’ve seen twenty- or thirty-some concerts and one who, as myself, has seen a hundred-some—EVERYONE I saw afterwards was astonished at the sheer force of power and deep emotional expression of this concert. Folks were absolutely flipping out. There’s nothing like the high of seeing a show where she has just hit one out of the park into the next county, and looking at the faces of friends as their jaws are dragging the ground in amazement.

’97 Bonnie & Clyde was delivered with the most concentration of intensity of any night on this tour. Past the Mission began with huge, crashing chords on the lower register of the Boesey which were answered with supple, organlike tones from the Rhodes.

Then it was time for the first appearance on this tour of Sugar. This was not the lovely, soaring version of Sugar from the Dew Drop Inn Tour. This was essentially a piano reduction of the band arrangement from the ’98 and ’99 tours—sledgehammer powerful still with “just” the piano and her muscular chest voice. Wow. How fantastic it’s been when the old favorites have shown up on this tour for the first time! The (for me) long-awaited appearance last week of Little Earthquakes was a real breath-taking moment for me.

By the time she was into Doughnut Song with its increasingly strong repeats of “you can tell me it’s over,” I was shaking in my seat.

At this point I want to mention that this show had one of the necessary ingredients for an astonishingly good show—a great audience. Folks were darned quiet during the songs but explosively enthusiastic after they ended. Without this there’s no way she can do a truly top notch concert.

My notes for Mother say “tons of rubato but it still seemed natural, appropriate, and enhanced the expression.” I see I also noted how wonderful it was the way she had such wide-ranging dynamics, such as when she whispered “he’s gonna change my name” during this Mother.

If I’m ever gonna finish writing this I best skip to Imagine. She had supposedly told someone in New York that she would play it there, and of course last Tuesday was the anniversary of John Lennon’s birth so why she skipped it there and brought it out in Wallingford I don’t know, but the effect was staggering. She prefaced it by saying something like “If you could help me sing this it would be good.” Perhaps eighty to a hundred folks streamed down to the stage area and formed a warm cocoon for the performance of what HAD to have been THE most overwhelmingly emotional version of this song—ever. I know this sounds like bloated hyperbole but I’m not kidding. Remarkable. She also slipped in a change once to make the line into “a brotherhood of man—and woman.”

The first version on this tour of Mary and then Twinkle, and we were done.

The brother of a friend of mine had a ticket to this show but didn’t attend because the last several shows had already taken their toll and he didn’t think he could take anymore. He made a wise decision to skip this show, because surely, it would have at least put him into the hospital. So, if you’re feeling none too stable these days and have tickets for a show yet to come, steel yourself before you go with a barrel-full of resolve at the very least. Yikes. I’m not even sure how much more of this I can take and I ought to be used to this by now.